Mixtape: The Labour & The Shame

My newest mixtape is entitled “The Labour & The Shame”; for me it was a way to process the feelings I have about working in the videogame industry. Side ‘L’ imagines the PoV of labourers: It’s full of reminders to protect yourself whilst creating art for money (and reminders about why we sought out creative work in the first place). Side ‘S’ imagines, often from a first person PoV, the class of executives & boss guys from whom we need protection… you know the ones.

Running all through this mixtape are tracks from Gentle Giant’s “The Power & The Glory”, which is a concept album about how power reveals things. I’ve been listening to it a lot lately! In the ‘seeking power’ stage, the antihero of this record cloaks themself in altruism (paying lip service to whatever ideals their community wants them to have); but later, in the ‘having power’ stage, the actions they take begin revealing that special sort of villainy that we can locate within executives or politicians etc.

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Tk’emlúps 2022: BC Wildlife Park

We spent a few hours this month wandering around “BC Wildlife Park”, which is a rehabilitation centre for orphaned and injured wildlife (that tries very hard never to call itself a “zoo” lol). In this place you can find several of the largest organisms on the whole planet, including these rescued grizzlefriends Dawson and Knute:

My FAVE grizzly pic from the set is this one, where they’re both hanging out:

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Greenways, Bridges, Water & Trails

On a bicycle you can go just about anywhere in the lower mainland! Most of the dedicated paths run along rivers, lakes & old railway lines (or else beneath newish skytrain lines). These ones are from a variety of water bodies north from the river where I live:

And THESE ones are all from the north bank of stal̓əw̓ itself:

Lastly, here’s a picture of me:

ʔəleqsən

We visited the ‘George C. Reifel Migratory Bird Sanctuary’ at ʔəleqsən last weekend! One thing that happened was that this adventurous red-winged blackbird landed on my friend Kim:

But really that was only the START of the bird-related activity. This time of year we were privileged to chill with this sandhill crane, one of the biggest/weirdest birds in the region:

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FFH 331

Some navy people were hanging out at Lonsdale Quay today, answering questions & offering tours of their big-ass Halifax-class frigates. One’s called “The HMCS Vancouver (FFH 331)”, and it’s got a little orca on the side. The other one’s called the “HMCS Winnipeg (FFH 338)” and it’s got a little buffalo.

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Mixtape: Loneliness Mania Blues

Today you can get quick streaming access to like, every single song ever recorded, just by typing its name into Spotify! It’s a horrible deal for everybody but that’s how it is now, haha.

In an era of Total Entertainment Forever, we know that all this abundant ‘content’ comes to lose its appeal; what matters instead is stuff like the curation of content, the sequencing of it (“the digging of unostentatious holes to bury the stuff in”, as Joseph Conrad once put it). So, that just means I’m getting back into mixtapes now!

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q̓ʷulƛ̕əl̕

Last weekend Louise and I visited a place that in settlerworld we know as Boundary Bay (in particular a nature park near the bay’s western peninsula, a spot called Point Roberts). The Puget Sound Geographical Names map offers us a better name for this peninsula however: q̓ʷulƛ̕əl̕! (The Musqueam Place Names Map offers us another good name for it: smaq̓ʷəc!)

Before the industrial apocalypse, this area was great for the practice of catching salmon in reef nets. Today, well, it’s pretty good for taking photos haha.

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Birds of x̌ʷay̓x̌ʷəy̓

This time of year, a clan of great blue herons comes to nest in a stand of trees near x̌ʷay̓x̌ʷəy̓ (a.k.a. Stanley Park). It’s an amazing thing to watch these pelecaniformes maneuver; they’re giant birds, & yet they seem to glide forever on nothing except air.

Wood ducks can’t exactly glide like these herons do, BUT they clearly have the fanciest color scheme out of any bird in this park! I love their little feather helmets & strangely-narrow necks.